the weighing

Mak sent me to do the market shop on my own for the first time. The morning market, the pasar pagi, which is a completely different animal from the night one. The morning one is fish laid out on ice and vegetables in green piles and an auntie behind every stall, and everything still wet from being splashed to look fresh, and it starts before the sun is properly up. It is loud, and it smells of the sea and of coriander and of the drains, all at the same time, and I love it more than almost anywhere.

She gave me one ringgit and a short list. Ikan bilis. A bundle of kangkung. Two onions. That was the whole list. Easy. But I did not want to come home with only the list. I wanted to come home with the list, and one thing extra. A little treat, a surprise, something nobody had asked for, slipped into the basket at the bottom. So I gave myself a bigger mission than Mak had given me. I was going to make one ringgit stretch further than one ringgit goes, and bring home more than I was sent for.

The way to make money stretch, I had decided, was trading. You do not just buy a thing and walk away. You buy a thing, and you trade it for a slightly better thing, and you trade that for a better thing again, up and up, until you are holding more than you started with. A trade-up chain. I had watched the big people haggle, and I had decided that haggling was the secret, the real magic of the market, the way you get the better of the price.

But first I had to understand the scales.

The weighing auntie at the fish stall has a scale, and a thumb. The thumb sometimes rests, very lightly, on the edge of the scale, and sometimes it does not, and the number the scale shows is, in the end, the number she has decided it will show. I watched her do it three times. I became completely convinced that her thumb held some kind of ancient magic that I was going to have to learn before I could call myself a real shopper. I stood and stared at her thumb like it held the secret of the whole world. She caught me staring, gave me one small extra fish for free, and told me to stop blocking her stall. The thumb is real magic. I have decided this. One day I will have a thumb like that and the world will tremble at the fish stall.

The fish auntie is the most powerful person in the whole market and she knows it. She can clean a fish faster than you can decide whether to buy it. People do not really haggle with her. They ask her, very politely, what the price is going to be today, and she tells them, and that is the price, and everybody is happy, because being told a price by a person with a thumb like that is its own kind of bargain.

Then I started the chain.

My first trade was a marble for a bruised mango, which Divya said was a bad trade and I said was an investment. My second was the bruised mango for a fish head the fish auntie was going to throw out anyway, which I was going to trade up for something much better. Except a cat took an interest in the fish head, and the negotiations got complicated, and I came out of it somehow holding the marble again and owing the cat nothing, which Divya said was the best outcome I could realistically have hoped for.

The trade I was proudest of, the one that felt like real commerce, was a hair clip Divya found in her pocket for a small bag of buah kana from an auntie who I think felt sorry for me. Then I traded the buah kana for a bigger bag of buah kana from the next stall along. Divya pointed out that it was the same buah kana, only more of it, and not better at all, and that I had paid for the extra with a hair clip, which had been free. I told her she did not understand commerce. She said she understood arithmetic, which on a market morning is worth a great deal more, and she put the bigger bag in the basket before I could trade it down into something worse.

I will not take you through all of it, because some of it I am still not proud of. But I traded. I gave a thing for a thing, and a thing for a better thing. Divya came with me, because Divya always comes, and she stood at my shoulder doing the actual arithmetic out loud while I traded. Every time I made a swap, I announced that it was basically free, a brilliant deal, robbery really, and Divya would quietly say the real numbers, the true ones, which were never as good as my numbers, because my numbers were made out of hope and her numbers were made out of maths.

Ah Wei was no help, and I should have known. Ah Wei's family runs a stall, so Ah Wei always has food, and he cannot bear to watch food go to waste. I tried to pay for one thing with a packet of keropok. The keropok never made it to the stall. Half of it went into Ah Wei between one stall and the next. He looked sorry every single time. He said a snack in a pocket on a hot morning is a snack on its way to going stale, and a snack going stale is worse than a snack eaten, and he is so sincere about it that you cannot even be cross with him, you can only watch your trade goods disappear.

The chain got grander and grander, and somewhere in the middle of being grand, I lost the plot completely.

Because while I was busy trading up toward my brilliant surprise, I traded away part of the actual list. I had been so clever, so deep in the chain, that I had spent the onion money on the path to the treat, and now the stalls were starting to pack up. The morning market shuts fast, all at once, the ice melting into the drains, the aunties hosing down the concrete, the whole thing folding away while you are still deciding. And there I stood with a clever pile of trade goods and no onions. Onions were on the list. Onions were the plain boring point of the whole thing, the one job Mak had actually sent me out to do.

I had to undo it. I had to trade all the way back down, give up the grand surprise, untangle my own cleverness one swap at a time, and turn it all back into plain onions and ikan bilis and a bundle of kangkung, the boring list, the thing I was sent for, before the last stall closed and I went home with a basket full of brilliant deals and nothing anyone could cook.

So I undid it. And while I was trading my clever pile back into plain onions at the vegetable auntie's stall, she bagged up my kangkung and put in extra. More than I had paid for.

"That is for your mak," she said. The way you say a thing you have said a hundred times.

I asked what she meant. And it came out, from her and from the fish auntie at the next stall. They always put a bit extra in for Mak. For years. A little more kangkung. A couple of extra ikan. The small fish off the end of the tray. Because Mak sends kuih over on a slow day. Because Mak watches a stall when an auntie has to step away. The whole street looking after the whole street, going round and round, since before I could walk.

The surprise I had been so proud of inventing was not my invention at all. It was already here. It had been going round this market every morning, both directions, for years, and all I had done was nearly miss it while being clever.

I went home with the list, all of it, and a bit extra in the bag that I had not paid for and had not thought of. I put it on the table next to Mak. I did not call it a surprise. It was not mine to call a surprise. It was just my turn to carry the extra bit home. Mak took it the way she takes everything, without a fuss, and slid half of it back toward me before I had even let go of the bag.